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Oh yeah, because cycles of vengeance work so well for everyone involved. /s It's precisely that attitude that is fueling this in the first place, the notion that punishment is the only option, that we as a society and as individuals owe nothing to each other, that duty does not exist, that forgiveness is a sign of weakness. No. No. Forgiveness is a method of strength and leveraging the good traits of humanity. Moral high ground is a corrupt phrase because of the implication, but moral integrity is still a cornerstone for human society and greatness. It's okay to let ourselves emotionally indulge in a moment of "they had it coming," but it's incredibly dangerous as well as morally bankrupt to make it into a guiding principle. And online discourse is not the greatest place to start, but it's a place to start. Even here, we should sit up and treat people like people, because we can and because we should. We owe it to each other.
I would like to see the end of the first cycle, please, before I spend any time worrying about the next cycle.
And what do you do to people who have no integrity? Do you drive them out of your lands? Kill them, or their children? Put them in camps to teach them integrity?
Democrats want to import people that have no integrity, and are not fit for this country. They want to do it at a rate that replaces me and mine. I'm not going to handicap myself with slave morality while my hometown is overrun by somali muslims and other assorted Africans who have no fucking business on this side of the Atlantic.
People suck, didn't you know that? Hell is other people. I am treating her like a person, but I don't care about people. I care about friends and family and these people are neither. I care about my countrymen and I'm not talking about paper citizens or hyphenated Americans. I don't care about Muslims, at all, despite them being people.
So maybe one cycle of vengeance, first. Maybe when immigration stops altogether, and the foreign born fraction in this country falls below 5%, we can recalibrate. Maybe when every Trump-deranged journalist and politician is out of a job.
But not now. Not this moment.
I can only hope that one day you see the shortsightedness of this view. It’s also incredibly ironic that you espouse such a myopic selfishness when the very country you praise was built on (and successful because of rather than in spite of) caring about other people beyond your immediate surrounds.
Like, John Adams defended British soldiers in court despite the unpopularity of it, and the the fact they really weren’t countryman and he certainly didn’t like them, because he recognized that a right to a lawyer and a fair defense was, long-term, an important thing we want to have. It seems you have yet to learn that wisdom.
Don't lie to me about my own ancestors and my own people.
The country I praise was built on and successful because of people like my borderer ancestors who cross the Appalachians to settle Tennessee. They didn't care about other people beyond their immediate surrounds, and in fact when more people came to their immediate surrounds, they left Tennessee and kept going west, beating a trail for freedom across the wilderness.
That's my country, my history, my legacy. Not some fairy tale concocted in the post-war haze of propaganda about how America is an idea or a nation of immigrants. NO. It is a nation of conquerors, of settlers, of colonists and of pilgrims who shared a language and history among themselves. Not immigrants. Not diversity. And not by defending British soldiers.
In fact, the fact that he's defending British soldiers puts a lie to what you're saying. Those people were of the same race, spoke the same language, and were as brothers or cousins. Adams defended the Brits because he identified with them, and therefore he was defending his own right to representation.
There's no wisdom in watching your family be replaced and their lands taken and repopulated by foreigners.
Lie? Lmao. Those British soldiers from the Boston Massacre in 1770 Boston at the time were representatives of what many (of course, not all - there was already conflict between patriot and loyalist groups even within Boston) felt to be a foreign occupation force. Hundreds of soldiers, brought in from overseas and not the colonies, were stationed in Boston for the explicit purpose of making sure the tax was collected for Britain's foreign wars, that was the whole point. The soldiers were not neighbors and nor was the tax for local purposes. "Countrymen" is always a bit of a slippery term, of course, and is easily abused. Most students of history are well aware of how fierce anti-immigrant feeling was toward immigrants from Germany or Ireland, for example, in very strong language decrying how bad and evil and Catholic and hard-drinking and foreign-culture they were... and now many of those same descendants are easily considered true-blooded Americans. Weird how the categories of hate conveniently change, eh? Catholics then, Muslims now, maybe? I'm exaggerating a bit, but you're the one telling yourself a historical fairy tale. I say this as someone with probably very similar ancestry/family history (though further West).
I should also add that the country wasn't set up by people from Tennessee. It was set up and allowed/enabled to grow by the earliest patriots who came up with a system of governance based on the same principles that resulted in that defense of those soldiers, it was explicitly a governmental model that made a point to expand legal protection - but also cultural grace - to those beyond your immediate neighbors, friends, and family.
Your own native Tennessee was a particular hotbed of anti-British sentiment from its early history, especially around the 1812 war where your politicians were among the leaders of the war hawks, which is hardly the attitude of former brothers or cousins, adding additional irony. Or later on, when a lot of Irish immigrants showed up in Tennessee, making up over 8% who were explicitly foreign-born of the Memphis population at one point per this interesting longer article about the Irish in Tennessee, just as one example. Of note: while later attitudes changed (largely due to Southern hatred of Blacks being greater), and on the whole the attitudes weren't as sharply anti-Irish as elsewhere in the United States, even the mayor of Memphis used to use language like calling them a "special abomination" and the 'scum of the city slums'.
Hmm, a little uncomfortable, huh?
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I’ll say this about “moral high grounds” — outside of the moral society created by force to enforce those standards is a fool’s belief. If I’m in a society where stealing is normal, my forgiveness of a thief is not noble, it just makes me a mark. And my refusal to participate in vengeance when there are no legal systems to protect me simply means I’m a walking future crime victim along with any family members too weak to defend themselves from attack.
Duels were not common in the Middle Ages because those people had no moral integrity. They were probably more moral than we are. But in the context of a weak state where your ability to defend your honor in combat was needed for the protection of your clan, you didn’t have much choice. If you let people insult you without some sort of duels or whatever they didn’t see that as integrity, they saw it as cowardly and it was blood in the water.
Now where that leaves us in the current era is a bit murky to me. If we’re entering an era where getting people unemployed for political opinions is a norm, refusing to participate just means you are a walking future victim. And that goes for anything else here. If you aren’t going to fight back, it’s cowardice, not integrity which only make sense in a world where everyone agrees to the norm.
No, it's still noble. It also makes you a mark, but the one does not cancel out the other.
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I agree! But the concept is a lot more complicated than that and requires that the other person stop doing whatever it is you need to forgive them for. If I go to a concert and there's an active shooter murdering people in the crowd, preventing them from committing more murders is actually the moral course of action when compared to just forgiving them and letting them continue to shoot people.
That said in this specific case, while I think no cancelling would be ideal, I am not going to blame the people on the right for taking advantage of the new rules the left has set up until the left makes a serious effort to go back and dial down the temperature.
I mean, how would you even measure this? What would it take to say "okay the temperature is going in the right direction, thanks left", do you think you would be able to recognize it or is it purely a vibes check? Because crazies gonna crazy so there's always gonna be something out there. Is it like, LoTT losing tons of likes/subscribers/attention? Is it more about MSM cover for twitterati? Or would it be public disavowal by leading figures? This is an actual question that I'm curious your perspective on, what you feel would be most impactful/genuine step back and what that looks like.
I legitimately haven't thought about this because I didn't actually think there was any way to stop it - I assumed it would just continue to get worse over time until there's an irreversible reduction in societal complexity (good luck cancelling someone whose job is stealing copper wiring from abandoned buildings). Any kind of positive steps in this direction would be extremely negative steps, personally, for anyone on the left who actually wanted to make them. Furthermore, it isn't actually like there's a central authority figure who could speak for the entire left and announce that the days of cancelling people are over - and even if there was, making that kind of announcement would doubtless cause them to lose all that influence and authority. Second, the trust required for such an announcement to be taken seriously or in good faith just isn't there, either. You'd have to come up with meaningful consequences for this kind of behaviour, along with a reliable and trustworthy enforcement body, because a system like this would absolutely get gamed the second it was implemented.
The only workable alternative that I can see would be legislation that mandates incredibly harsh penalties for the employers who actually fire people like this, but that has consequences and a lot of complications as well - a left-wing political group should absolutely be able to fire someone because they found out that he was actually a secret nazi doing his best to sabotage them from within.
Of course, my dream goal would be for the world to adopt my preferred political system (non-catholic environmentalist distributism), which would mean that cancellation can't really happen due to the altered structure of the economy. But that isn't going to happen anytime soon so it isn't really a realistic proposal.
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It's weird, because you've answered your own question as far as I can tell. Each of these things is an indication of the temperature going down, though we could probably come up with more examples if we thought about it.
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I believe that it is morally necessary to keep hate out of one's heart. "Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you" is the correct path forward.
On the other hand, it does no good to pretend that they are not actually your enemies, or to imagine that this path is likely to result in net-positive material outcomes. It's how you secure your soul, not your life. Further, most people are not actually interested in securing their souls, so it is not a good framework for predicting behavior at a population-level.
You do not live in a world compatible with "the moral high ground" in any real sense. You can adopt the moral high ground regardless, but you should do so with the understanding that the likely consequences are net-negative for you from a materialist perspective. Certainly you should not expect the majority of those around you to adopt such a position.
My take for many years now has been "turn the other cheek" in personal matters, but don't allow the wicked to cause harm unabated to others. Forgiving others their trespasses against me, even seven times seventy times, does not mean allowing their trespasses against other innocent people to go unopposed.
I can only comment that, in my own personal experience and in observation of numerous others, it is both very easy and very attractive to launder one's own hatred into faux-altruism. I know that I wish to do this, and so I know I cannot trust such convenient constructions. Especially when the forgiveness is nebulous, and the "righteous anger" is focused and specific.
I've certainly caught myself doing that more times than I care to admit. It's definitely something more aspirational than what I am actually capable of consistently living up to.
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“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven.”
This is an aside, but as an extremely imperfect Christian who is trying to be better, how do you do it? I don’t think I hate anyone, but I certainly have a hard time loving and praying for my enemy. I’ll take any advice you got.
Poorly.
In my experience, the starting point is to confront the fact that when he says these things, he's talking to you, specifically, about your hatred, specifically. If your response is "yeah, this is a lesson that other people really need, they should listen to him", you have already missed the point.
The next step is to recognize the specific parts of your thinking that are hateful. Sin starts as a choice and becomes a habit, a reflex, an instinct. Resisting it means pushing the other way, to gain awareness of the sin as sin, usually in retrospect to start with, but with the goal of gaining awareness of the sin in the moment, and ultimately at the moment of choice. From "I've hated", to "I am hating", to "I am about to hate".
Once you have awareness of the choice, you have to choose righteousness. The best way I've found to approach that is to precommit and practice, to make your decision as much as possible in advance and in a position of strength, rather than trying to choose well in a moment of weakness. For me, hymns help a great deal; it is difficult to maintain hatred while singing It is well with my soul. The hymns do a good job of giving me a model to validate my thoughts against, an example of what a Christian's thoughts should be. In difficult moments, they can pour cold water on the embers in your mind. The ultimate goal is to make obedience habitual, instinctive, to make the right choice until it ceases, as much as possible, to be a choice, but simply part of what you are.
You have to remember and to internalize that you are not better than those you hate, that your hate is not righteous or justified in any way. You, like them, are a sinner. You, like them, were once under condemnation, and your debts are forgiven in exactly the way you are willing to forgive the debts of others. This is not optional, and Jesus is explicit that forgiveness is the standard by which your immortal soul will be judged.
You have to remember that no human is in control, and that there are no ends in this world to judge means by. This life is transient, all humans die, justice is fleeting at best, and suffering is and always will be the common lot of all humans on this Earth. There is no progress, there is no arc of history, there is no glorious victory to be won in any meaningful sense in this life. It does not seem to me that this view demands pacifism, but it does demand a cold, hard realism on what is actually achievable from conflict, an understanding that conflict has far less upside than the world may recognize, and that we should be far more wary of it than the world would think. If your side wins, that fact alone means nothing in the grand scheme of things. If your side loses, that fact alone likewise means nothing. If God's design hinges on some outcome, you have no idea what that outcome is or why it is necessary, and certainly no reason to believe that it coincides neatly with your worldly preferences for ease or glory or the defeat of your enemies. Maybe it serves his purpose for you and all you know and love to die in pain and horror and darkness. It was so for the Japanese Christians, and for many others, and he has promised to wipe the tears from every eye.
The ingrained instincts of the world and of one's own nature fight and scream against every part of this process. It is not easy, and you will regularly fail, but the point is to repent and keep trying. There will be no shortage of opportunities.
This is amazing and very insightful. I think you hit the nail on the head with the idea of being aware of the choice to sin just before it happens, so you can address it. Thank you.
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I can only describe this sentiment as a serious game theory L for red tribe.
Life is more than game theory, despite nerds' obsession with trying to reduce everything to game theory.
One of my favorite blog posts:
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I would generally describe the attempts to frame this angry mob behavior as a productive and rational game theory strategy as "a serious game theory L for red tribe", yeah.
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There are equilibria that are better for the collective out there but we probably do need tit-for-tat to get to them.
If woke cancellation tactics were already forms of disproportionate retribution against random unknown people, how is adopting the same tactic on the right going to result in a better equilibrium?
First of all, it doesn't end up hurting that many people directly, since only a small minority are going to get cancelled in the first place, and that makes it hard for people to take it seriously enough to do something about it. But second of all, I'm not actually sure there is much that can be done about it, short of passing laws that protect the jobs of randos, and making those laws have teeth. Like, plenty of my progressive friends IRL hate cancel culture and wokescolds as much as any right winger, but they don't have any power to stop the decentralized mobs calling for firings.
How does tit-for-tat even work with a large, decentralized collective anyways?
It decreases the overall acceptability of disproportionate retribution among people on the other side. It's the same reason why woke cancellation is a threat in the first place: it affects few people directly, but it intimidates a lot more.
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The rules of the online game currently are pretty poor, but it's not like they are actually immutable. And are the 'game theory stakes' even that high in the Twitterverse? Personally, I think no.
Would you sell your soul for a nickel? That's Twitter.
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